I'm with Billmon on this one (Failure Mode 05/28/04). Politicians in the nature of the thing have to come up with some kind of pragmatic-sounding (or at least hopeful-sounding) solution.
But what we're facing in the Iraq War is not how to achieve a positive outcome. It's how to minimize the disaster. As Billmon puts it in a nice historical reference, it's "messer than Manchukuo." Manchukuo was the Japanese name for occupied Manchuria.
I'm not convinced that Billmon's view of what's emerging in right, though:
At best – at best -- we’re likely to end up with a weak central government whose writ barely extends beyond the Baghdad suburbs, precariously kept in power only by a U.S.-led Praetorian Guard and/or a CIA-run Mukhabarat. Meanwhile, the rest of the country is rapidly fragmenting into an independent-in-all-but-name Kurdistan, a Sunni Triangle dominated by ex-Baathist generals, and a Shi’a south gradually falling under Iranian influence and behind-the-scenes control.
It sounds like a civil war between various factions is possible. But the difficulties presented to all parties, internal and external, of the outcome he foresees as the best possibility are so great that I think they are unlikely as more than an interim phase. A more likely outcome is civil war, possibly accompanied by invasion from neighboring countries, ending with a strong central government of more-or-less authoritarian character.
But he is right about this:
So this is what failure looks like – and, realistically, it’s much too late to look to the UN or NATO or our Arab “allies” to save us from the consequences of the administration’s folly.
Josh Marshall (05/30/04), who came very close to supporting the war but before it began decided the Bush team was not competent to pull it off, also thinks we're looking at failure. And he even see the current White House rationale for defending Bush's policy as essentially being, support Bush because he's better able to manage the failure of his own Iraq policies than Kerry is.
The president's actions, if not his words, concede that Iraq has become the geopolitical equivalent of a botched surgery -- botched through some mix of the misdiagnosis of the original malady and the incompetence of the surgeon. Achieving the original goal of the surgery is now close to an afterthought. The effort is confined to closing up as quickly as possible and preventing the patient from dying on the table. And now the 'doctor', pressed for time and desperate for insight, stands over the patient with a scalpal in one hand and the other hurriedly leafing through a first year anatomy text book.
Billmon also refers to a study by the conservative British International Instutite for Strategic Studies that estimates that 500,000 troops would be needed for effective stability operations. He references this article by RAND's James T. Quinlivan (Burden of Victory: The Painful Arithmetic of Stability Operations RAND Review Summer 2003; it's also on p. 28 of the *.pdf version of the issue) that projects a similar number based on the troops-to-population ratios from British experiences in Northern Ireland and Malaysia and NATO experience in the Balkans:
The population of Iraq today is nearly 25 million. That population would require 500,000 foreign troops on the ground to meet a standard of 20 troops per thousand residents. This number is more than three times the number of foreign troops now deployed to Iraq (see figure). For a sustainable stabilization force on a 24-month rotation cycle, the international community would need to draw on a troop base of 2.5 million troops. Such numbers are clearly not feasible and emphasize the need for the rapid creation of indigenous security forces even while foreign troops continue to be deployed. The extremely low force ratio for Afghanistan, a country with a population even larger than that of Iraq, shows the implausibility of current stabilization efforts by external forces.
Meanwhile, war supporter Tom Friedman (Tilting the Playing Field New York Times 05/30/04)continues to believe things can be okay in Iraq because, hey, look at Russia. But even he's lowering his sights in the general direction of what can realistically be expected:
We need to rebalance our policy. We still have a chance to do in Iraq the only thing that was always the only thing possible — tilt it in a better direction — so over a generation Iraqis can transform and liberate themselves, if they want. What might an Iraq tilted in the right direction look like? It would be more religious than Turkey, more secular than Iran, more federal than Syria, more democratic than Saudi Arabia and more stable than Afghanistan.
At least "We have to tilt in the right direction!" is marginally more inspiring as a war slogan than, "At least we're not as bad as Saddam!"
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